


Cooperation

by Pigeon_theoneandonly



Series: N7 Month Prompt Challenge 2020 [3]
Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Alenko Orchard, And also more than a little of his spine, Gen, Kaidan gets his kindness from his mom, Mass Effect 3, earth invasion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-06
Updated: 2020-11-06
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:07:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27410938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pigeon_theoneandonly/pseuds/Pigeon_theoneandonly
Summary: In the midst of the reaper invasion of Earth, Kaidan's mother finds kindness can still be a path to survival.
Series: N7 Month Prompt Challenge 2020 [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1999261
Comments: 10
Kudos: 11





	Cooperation

Maybe it starts with an apple.

Maybe it starts with the woman worn ragged, standing on the front porch when Nimura Alenko answers the door. Her brother-in-law has asked her to stop doing that. But Nimura has never been afraid of people, not as a child during the Three Years War, not as a foreigner in Vancouver, and not now, with Earth in the midst of devastating alien invasion. 

The woman says they’re just passing through, her daughter crowding behind her, no more than nine or ten. As if travelers still exist. “Refugee” hangs off her better, but it’s easy to tell by the desperate look in her eye that giving voice to her circumstances may well unravel the last thread of her composure. 

Here in the interior, there are fewer reapers. None of the large ships Nimura still sees in her nightmares as clearly as she saw them from the shuttle window, the morning they left. Smaller units though—they’ve all heard them. Rumors of disappearances fly between the farmsteads. They only travel by night.

Yet here she is, in the middle of the day, her child with her. Kaidan’s age when Conatix took him. 

Nimura lets them in. Then she goes to the kitchen, and comes back with a basket.

The woman stares down at the first apples of the year, several dozen of them, jonathans. “We can’t eat all these.”

“They’re for the others,” Nimura answers, unthinkingly.

Now she’s staring at her. Fearful. “There aren’t any— I mean, it’s just us.”

Nimura has lived through an invasion before. She knows people band together, not only in resistance, not only in the ways history remembers, but also in survival. There are more people where this woman came from. It’s exactly what makes Andrew tell her not to answer the door— fear of being overrun by hungry homeless bands. But you can’t control other people. You can only choose the person you want to be. 

And she chooses to be a person who will feed a hungry child who comes to her door.

The woman thanks her and leaves, and Nimura thinks that’s the end of it, or at least as much an end as there can be with Andrew’s constant lecturing to be more careful. As if he knew anything about war; he’d inherited the orchard, while Tom went amiably off to the navy, and if she knows her husband at all, she is certain Tom would approve of her charity. 

Thinking about Tom inevitably leads to remembering Vancouver in ashes, and that she has no idea where he is, or if he’s even still alive. Which leads to thinking about Kaidan, which leads to biting her lip and refocusing on packing apples away by the bushel against the coming winter.

Until, one afternoon, a note arrives, stuck under the door knocker. She sets down her latest basket and gives it a read. 

_Husks spotted two miles south, three dozen strong, moving fast. Stay safe._

She reads it twice more before she goes inside. Then there’s a lot of yelling. Andrew means well; none of it’s for her. But he’s scared, like everyone else, and he’s always tended to grasp towards control as a means to stabilize himself. People leaving them notes like that isn’t controlled. 

But after an hour or two, and with the assistance of his wife, she manages to get some sense into him. They bring all the staff into the main house— more defensible than the outbuildings— and douse all the lights when the sun goes down. It’s a long and painfully quiet night, at least, until the husks begin to wail. It’s a sound not of this world. They sit at the windows, just out of sight with what weapons they could locate. Waiting for the dawn. Husks didn’t seem to care much about sunlight, but humans fared better against them when they could see clearly.

Nimura discreetly leaves a basket of fresh apples, and a few jars of preserves and other miscellaneous items they can spare, in the shadow of the porch where nobody who isn’t looking will readily see it. 

By the next day, it’s gone.


End file.
